


It Came From Outer Space

by Toxic_Waste



Category: Milo Murphy's Law, Phineas and Ferb
Genre: At Least One Possibility, Ending Fix, Gen, Spoilers, Spoilers for The Phineas And Ferb Effect
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-16
Updated: 2018-08-16
Packaged: 2019-06-28 07:50:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,566
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15702957
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Toxic_Waste/pseuds/Toxic_Waste
Summary: An alternate version of a specific scene from this crossover.





	It Came From Outer Space

Things were looking very, very grim indeed.

Candace knew she could be prone to exaggerating from time to time, but she felt that at least _now_ she could safely think such a thing and have it not be any risk of stretching the truth. To tell the truth, she hadn’t felt very well all day – hadn’t felt very much like herself at all.

(Well, that was what she wanted the Mysterious Force to believe, at any rate. If she pretended to be a generic, boring teenager who wasn’t at _all_ interested in busting, then maybe it would forget about her, right? And then she could suddenly bust her brothers before it had a chance to react. It was going to work, too, she was sure of it.)

(Well, she hoped.)

And normally she’d just have taken a nap, or something, maybe? Ordered pizza, or spied on her brothers a little more (that always got the old juices flowing again), but today was not ‘normal’, and none of those things were very much an option.

Well, she could probably order pizza, at least, but she had a feeling that any such request would be soundly rejected by the mutated plant… people(?) standing all around. And she could have _tried_ to bust her brothers, though she doubted she’d be very successful (admittedly, that wasn’t new), mainly because of those same mutated plant people – in fact, she was pretty sure that Phineas had called them ‘pistachions’ at one point, now that she thought about it – had those spears and also had everyone tied up with these super thick, scratchy vines that were starting to irritate the skin on her arms.

She should probably just be thankful they _were_ pistachios, (or pistachions) and not parsnips. Because they definitely had the ‘wild’ part under control.

She flexed her arms against the vines, and they gave a surprisingly large amount, which was a good sign – if she could just find something to use as a weapon, she could probably take down a good few of these overgrown garden pests on her own. They certainly were a lot smaller than that alligator she’d beaten down earlier that summer, and even if they were more agile, she could always just _run_ , too. The distance between the Googolplex and home was no less than two miles, and she’d taken the whole thing at a sprint so many times she lost count.

Nothing could catch her if she got started, that was for sure.

The only question _then_ was of where she could go, exactly, which made her realize that she wasn’t going to be able to escape on her own – she’d have to break Phineas and Ferb out with her. Or at least one of them.

At least the really _big_ pistachion seemed disinclined to fight, and the fifty dozen copies of that greasy middle-aged guy scattered around really were distracting the vast majority of the plant army with their weird squirt guns. (She wondered why her Good Future Self – or even her Bad Future Self – hadn’t warned her about this happening earlier this summer? She sure could use _their_ help right about now.)

“Great! Real great!” the pistachion who seemed to be in charge yelled. He seemed vaguely irritated at his really big monster walking off like that, which Candace supposed was understandable, even if she didn’t pity him in the slightest. “Fire the machine!”

Oh, yeah, the machine. The one that, apparently, turned people into plants. Candace swallowed, and the few pistachions still guarding their group began egging them forwards again, towards the giant machine and the ‘M. U. L. C. H.’ banner hanging over it. There were only a handful of guards still actively guarding them, and she counted three spears between them. If she could just get ahold of _one_ , she could probably give the other two a run for their money, after all, they were just plants, and she’d beaten an _alligator_.

Alternatively, she could just try to find her mom and bust the whole thing to her. That might work, too, though Candace hadn’t seen Linda all morning, and didn’t know where she’d be by now, either.

“There’s an adapter we needed,” one of the pistachions working on the machine explained, as the one in charge slapped his palm against his forehead in exasperation.

“I don’t care!” was the reply. “Just plug the stupid thing in and fire the machine! We have humans to convert!”

Something poked her in the small of her back, and she resumed trudging forwards with the group, but time was running out. If nothing else, she was just going to have to escape on her own and hope that she could eventually figure out some way to rescue the others. (Which was great, because _she_ wasn’t the one who did the ‘saving’ - that was Phineas’ and Ferb’s thing, and if they couldn’t do it, who was she to think that she could, either?)

But Candace had been a platypus and a liquid and a giant furball and a regular giant and a dozen things _other_ than ‘herself’ last summer (and she didn’t even feel quite like herself now), and she’d had quite enough in the physical transmogrification department. The other things had been unpleasant enough to be – she wasn’t going to become a plant, either, at least not if she had anything to say about it.

Which she did – lots of things, in fact.

She stepped up onto the first stair leading to the machine’s platform, bracing to jump and run, when suddenly a loud roar filled the air. Her first instinct was ‘the machine’.

No, no it wasn’t the machine.

The pistachion in charge must’ve had the same thought, given by the way he looked at his machine, but turned around, too, facing Candace and the rest of the group, his weird black-and-orange plant eyes widening as Candace suddenly realized that the sky had gone very, very dark indeed.

And whirling. And a strange, unearthly glow that fell on her, like she was suddenly under some great spotlight.

The whirling was too loud to hear anything else now, even as she saw the pistachion in charge direct the guards to hurl their spears at her. She cringed, ducking down, but… nothing ever came. The spears, too, became caught up in the pale warm light streaming down, instantly ceasing to move forwards and instead drifting up… slowly… but surely.

Candace was also drifting up, she realized belatedly, even as her feet left the ground. The pistachion leader yelled something else, and the guards shot those long, extendy-vine arms at her again, but as soon as the tendrils entered the light, they too lost their forwards momentum. Figuring there was never going to be a better opportunity, Candace bit her tongue and struggled against the vines wrapped around her arms with all her might.

The fibers snapped one by one, peeling off, and at the whole thing abruptly broke into as her arms jerked free.

She shaded her eyes, looking up into the light, at the immense black disc from which was emenating, but it was too bright and she was forced to look away, her eyes watering as she rubbed the red marks on her arms from the vines.

The fighting down below her had ceased, duplicates of that brown-haired guy and plant person alike turning to stare at her as she drifted up, up and up, unable to even so much as see what she was being pulled towards – or by what.

Maybe she should be panicking.

But the pistachions didn’t seem to know what it was, either, and what _it_ was could hardly be worse than what _they_ were, right? Nearly a dozen spears were stuck in the beam of light now, to the point where Candace stopped cringing back with each one thrown.

She stuck out her tongue at the pistachions. Screw _them_ for ruining her chances at busting her brothers today. Stupid apocalyptic scenarios and their ‘for the greater good of mankind’ choices.

Metal grated against metal over her head, and she was pulled inside some box of some sort that closed around her with a resounding thump. The whirling ceased, followed by the light, just moments later.

“Ow!” she exclaimed, falling to the floor with a thump, landing squarely on her tailbone. Dull pain exploded in her rear end, and she grit her teeth (very nearly biting her tongue again.) Pulling herself to her feet, she cleared her throat and mustered up her best brave voice. “Alright, what’s going on here? Phineas? Ferb? Are _you_ behind this? I swear, if you are, you are so-”

“reh dnuof ew!” a high-pitched, sort of nasally voice exclaimed.

Candace stopped abruptly mid-sentence at the speaker. “Wait, how-”

“denruter sah neeuq eht!” the little green aliens – the _Martians_ – cheered, their many antenna bobbing about excitedly. “sretsnom esoht morf reh devas ew! ti did ew!”

The entire space was filled with Martians, at least a dozen of them, the very tips of their three-eyed heads still beneath Candace’s waist as she looked down at them with a strange mixture of gratefulness and also just… utter bewilderment.

“How did you guys even get here, though? What’s with the – the-” she looked around, taking the room around her. It was no ordinary room, either – surrounded around with enormous windows that let her see the gray sky outside, the walls covered with buttons and screens and panels of every shape and size and color imaginable, flickering over with symbols in whatever was that unreadable alien language the Martians spoke.

“Well, I – thanks for saving me, I guess?” Candace said slowly, still trying to process all of… everything that was happening so rapidly. “But I don’t even know where you got the flying saucer from? I thought you guys didn’t even know how to smash a _Mars rover_ and now you show up with a flying saucer and you-” She paused for a moment, looking down at one of the aliens, who’d tugged on her skirt, holding up a shining yellow crown up towards her.

“Neeuq lufthgir o, su revo elur ot erom ecno nruter uoy lliw?”

“I… still can’t understand you, you know,” she pointed out. “Though I guess if you really want me to be your queen again _that_ badly, I can’t actually say ‘no’, can I?” She paused for a moment, remembering the ruckus that was surely going on beneath them. (Nothing was actually audible through the walls of saucer, at least.) “How good are you guys at killing plants, do you think? I know Mars doesn’t have any, but… maybe it’s because you killed them all?” She shrugged and took the crown, setting it snugly on her head again.

The alien crowd burst into cheers. “Neeuq eht liah lla! Neeuq eht liah lla! Neeuq eht liah lla!”

Candace waited for a minute or two, letting the applause and the shouting die down around her. “Alright, that’s real nice, guys. But there’s no time for another song.” She pointed out the windows, a little bit afraid of what was even going on out there now that she was up here. “You’ve flown here from freakin’ _Mars_ , apparently. Surely this saucer’s got some weapons on it somewhere? Or at least, I don’t know, weed killer of some kind?”

Then again, Mars _had_ no plants. Well, this sucked. She didn’t intend to live out the rest of her life ruling the Red Planet while her family was turned into a bunch of plants, honestly. That would just be… wrong.

“Fear not, child,” a deep voice boomed from behind her.

Candace squeaked, jumping into the air, whirling around to see… nothing?

“Down here, child.”

Her eyes landed on a tiny, pink-and-white creature no taller than her knee with a thick, black handlebar mustache sprouting from his frankly adorable face.

“Meap?!” she exclaimed. “What are _you_ doing here, now?”

“It’s quite simple, child,” the alien answered. “I was in the vicinity of your next-door neighbor (I believe you call it Mar?) and was accosted by these lovely folk informing me of your great danger.”

Candace rolled her eyes. “Yeah, okay, that was just my brothers. I’m not in… I mean, I wasn’t in danger _then_. Now.” She nodded. “Yes, yes I am. Well, was, technically. Is the, uh, UFO in danger? In case you hadn’t realized, there’s like this… giant army of evil living pistachio plants outside.”

Meap chuckled in a rich baritone unsettling to hear from a creature his size. “Worry not, my child,” he assured her. “Only the finest of cute-based weapons of war and defense have been fitted onto this – the flagship of the Meapian spacefaring fleet.”

“Wait, the what of the what now?”

Meap made some kind of face that vaguely resembled a smile without revealing his unsettlingly-colored alien tongue too much. He winked. “You saved our planet once, child. I said then that our planet and society as a whole would forever be in your debt. And now, we’ve come to make good and repay you.”

Candace’s eyes widened in amazement as the littlest alien waded through the crowd of Martians over towards what she presumed to be some kind of control panel or something. He snatched up a … it looked like a radio. Vaguely like one, at least. “Meapian Army! All systems go, we are clear for operation! Alert the High Command and notify the Council that the Orbital Fleet Invasion is commencing. For our intergalactic allies, for our fellow comrades that fell before Mitch’s armies!”

Static was the only answer.

And then “...meap?”

“Oh.” Meap smacked himself, reaching up to his mustache. “Always forget I have these things on.” He yanked the artificial facial facial hair clean off with a single fluid motion, clearing his throat into the radio. “Meap!”

“Meap!”

“Meap!” Meap turned back to Candace and nodded, fastening his mustache once. “It is done. We, we, we – are going to war.” Candace was only just about to ask if there was something she could do to help too, preferably away from the Martians who wouldn’t quit touching her and pulling on her clothes (plus she was _fifteen_ , for goodness’ sake, she shouldn’t have to sit an intergalactic war out because of that), but he shook his head and held up his hand. “Tell me, child. Have you ever operated an orbital laser cannon?”

“Uh…” she deadpanned. “I mean, I’ve pretty much mastered … parallel parking?” Didn't both those things require hand-eye coordination? So she had that going for her, at least.

“Ah.” There was a significant pause. “Forgive me, but you’ll have to elaborate farther? Is this some sort of Earth skill for which there is no equivalent activity in my society? I’m afraid my translator has failed to make much sense of it.”

Candace shrugged. “It’s pretty much the same thing, I guess?” She grinned. “Just gimme the laser, why don’t you? I totally got this. Those overgrown weeds ruined my busting today. It’s time … okay, I don’t think there’s any way to phrase this in particularly epic way, but you get the idea.”

Meap nodded. “Excellent. Let the bananas begin rotating in a counterclockwise manner lest the sun shine upon them!”

“What?”

He held up his palms. “Meapian expression for which no literal translation can be found in any Earth language. Believe me, though, child – it was _very_ epic.”


End file.
